Why I Write

You were given a name before you were given a voice.

A name that carried history, prayers, and prophecy. A name that reminded you that not everything would be understood at once. Kasarachi; it means in the Igbo tongue, “Tell it to God.” You wore that name proudly at home, where stories and traditions were a form of nourishment. But outside, the name was too heavy in other people’s mouths, a curiosity, a complication, a walking display of otherness. You learned early that you existed between worlds, never quite enough for either.

And then there was the silence forced on you by your own body—the stutter that held your words hostage, that tangled meaning before you could set it free. You practiced endlessly: breathing, pausing, waiting for your tongue to obey. Still, the fear lingered. The fear of being exposed, of being too slow, too broken, too obvious.

So you found another way. You discovered that paper had patience. On the page, you could stretch out your thoughts without interruption. You could pour out the words that sat clenched in your throat. Writing became both escape and defiance. If your voice stumbled in the world, it soared in ink.

And once you began, you didn’t want to stop. You wrote for the little girl who was terrified of being heard, and not. You wrote for the girl who brimmed with questions she could never trust her tongue to carry. You wrote for the girl who invented lies so vivid they felt like truth—worlds she could slip into when this one felt too narrow.

The more you wrote, the more you realized you were building something larger: a space where the in-between could breathe. Fantasy and science fiction felt like home because they bent rules, cracked open time, rewrote the limits of reality. They let you imagine futures where you weren’t forced to choose sides, where your difference was not burden but brilliance.

Now, you write because you must. Because the world you needed did not exist—and so you are etching it, word by word. You write to reclaim what was left unsaid, to reimagine what could be, to center the people who have always lived in the margins. You write because the page has always listened when nothing or no one  else would.

And always, you write for her—the little girl afraid of her own voice, who now knows she has one.